In the art of cube corner type retroreflectors, it has heretofore been the practice to produce the precisely formed and precisely positioned individual three faces comprising a single complete unit capable of retroreflecting incoming light rays striking such unit within a predetermined range of entrance angles as an integral body incorporating a plurality of similar such units. The manufacturing procedure involves starting with preformed metal pins, usually hexagonally sided, and grinding on each pin into three precisely formed and angled faces. A plurality of such resulting pins are then formed into a bundle, and an electroform is prepared using the face of the pin bundle incorporating the ground pin ends. In this way, a large number of cube corner retroreflective units per square centimeter of surface area can be formed in the region of a mold being used to form a back face of an individual cube-corner type reflector body, as those skilled in the art appreciate.
The manufacture of electroforms for cube-corner type reflector bodies thusly is inherently an expensive, time consuming undertaking making product molds for cube corner type retroreflectors inherently expensive to produce. The art would like to have a capability for directly making the portions of a reflector mold containing cube corner faceted units without the necessity of going through the route of pin grinding and electroform manufacture from pin bundles. So far as is now known, no one has heretofore succeeded in making reflector mold portions with cube corner type retroreflective faceted units formed therein by direct assembly of preformed strips slabs of metal bodies arranged in side-by-side relationship to one another so that a product such arrangement has formed in one face thereof a plurality of three-faceted cube corner retroreflective units.